Weekly Movie Recommendations

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE IMPOSTER – you gotta see this

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The Imposter

You just shouldn’t miss The Imposter. Life is at times stranger than fiction, and The Imposter is one of the most jaw-dropping documentaries I have seen. Nicholas Barclay, a 13-year-old Texas boy, vanished in 1994. Three years later, a young man surfaced in Spain, claiming to be an American boy kidnapped for sexual exploitation; he was identified by Spanish police as Nicholas Barclay. In fact, he was a serial impersonator named Frédéric Bourdin who had contrived the ruse to escape getting busted for his own petty misdeeds.

That’s not a spoiler, because The Imposter’s audience learns this framework right away. Here’s the first real shocker: the imposter is accepted by Nicholas’ family. This is more amazing because Frédéric is seven years older than Nicholas, is not a native English speaker and looks nothing like him. Of course, Frédéric is surprised that the family is embracing him as Nicholas – and then he begins to suspect why…

Filmmaker Bart Layton expertly spins the story, We meet the actual Frédéric Bourdin, members of the Barclay family, and the detectives who broke the case.

The Imposter is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and many other VOD providers.

Here’s the trailer.

Movies to See Right Now

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Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan in THE BIG SICK

Before you see any other movie, go see The Big Sick, the best American movie of the year so far. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fall in love. Here are more choices (but see The Big Sick first!):

  • Baby Driver is just an action movie, but the walking, running and driving are brilliantly time to the beat of music.
  • The Journey is a fictional imagining of a real historical event with wonderful performances from Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall as the two longtime blood enemies who collaborated to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The amusingly naughty but forgettable comedy The Little Hours is based on the dirty fun in your Western Civ class, Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
Emannuelle Devos in MOKA

 

Here are my top picks for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which just opened yesterday.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is Drinking Buddies that RARE romantic comedy where the characters act and react – not in the way we’ve come to expect rom com characters to act – but as unpredictably as would real people.  Drinking Buddies is available on DVD from Netlix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and GooglePlay.

On July 26, Turner Classic Movies brings us a feast of Alfred Hitchcock: Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds and North by Northwest. These are four of Hitchcock’s best, but today I’m choosing to feature The Birds, which I’ve screened recently. The Birds showcases Hitchcock’s brilliant sense of foreshadowing. Repeatedly, precursor events are unnoticed or dismissed by the characters, but seem vaguely offbeat or unsettling to the audience. And the suspense when the kids are walked out from their schoolhouse is unmatched. Plus no one could be more vulnerable to an aerial attack than when trapped in a glass phone booth.

I had forgotten about the flirtation between Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch (Rod Taylor), which certainly wouldn’t happen the same way today; Melanie is actually acting sexually aggressively for 1963. Today, we find Melanie and Mitch to be dressed with strange formality, but I can tell you that the wardrobe fits 1963 San Francisco.

Today’s audience, in our post 9/11 world, will identify with the locals in the town cafe as they assess whether the birds present a real or imagined threat. The Birds has been named to the National Film Registry.

THE BIRDS

DVD/Stream of the Week: DRINKING BUDDIES – an unusually genuine romantic comedy

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Drinking Buddies

In Drinking Buddies, Olivia Wilde plays the only female employee of an urban craft brewery. She and her co-worker best buddy (Jake Johnson) eat their lunches together every day, kid around on the job and join the crew for beers after work. They really connect and share trust with each other, and the two have achieved an enviable level of interpersonal comfort. If this were the typical idiot Hollywood romantic comedy, we could stop watching now, because we would know that they would dump their current significant others (Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston) in the third act because THEY ARE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER.

But, instead, writer-director Joe Swanberg surprises us with an unusually genuine romantic comedy. The characters act and react – not in the way we’ve come to expect rom com characters to act – but as unpredictably as would real people. Real people can be complex. Real people can make choices out of short-term self-gratification – or they can make sacrifices for the greater good – you don’t always know what’s coming. Swanberg trusts that the audience isn’t demanding a tired formula – and it pays off for him and for us.

Swanberg has also made the first Mumblecore movie that I’ve liked. I was on the verge of writing off the entire cinematic genre because I don’t like to watch self-involved twits obsess over their own avoidable, First World problems. Although Swanberg’s male characters have the Mumblecore bedhead, he makes this movie about a situation that could happen to any of us – discovering a potential soul mate outside our existing relationship. And the characters don’t wring their hands and kvetch – they struggle through the untidy challenge and move on.

The cast is solid, and the glammed-down Olivia Wilde is especially very good here.

Movies to See Right Now

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Ray Romano and Holly Hunter in THE BIG SICK

This week’s primary recommendation is to go out and see The Big Sick, the best American movie of the year so far. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fall in love.  Here are more choices (but see The Big Sick first!):

  • Baby Driver is just an action movie, but the walking, running and driving are brilliantly time to the beat of music.
  • The Journey is a fictional imagining of a real historical event and is an acting showcase for Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall as the two longtime blood enemies who collaborated to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The amusingly naughty but forgettable comedy The Little Hours is based on the dirty fun in your Western Civ class, Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

In my DVD/Stream of the Week, the thriller Locke,  Tom Hardy never leaves his car and, for the entire duration of the movie, we only see his upper body, his eyes in the rearview mirror, the dashboard and the roadway lit by his headlights. All the other characters are voiced – he talks to them on the Bluetooth device in his BMW.  Sure, that’s a gimmick – but it works because it complements the core story about the consequences of responsibility.  Locke is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

On July 15 Turner Classic Movies reminds why Alfred Hitchcock was the master of the suspenseful psychological thriller.  To paraphrase Hitchcock, when a bomb under a table explodes, the audience is SURPRISED.  But when the audience knows that the bomb under the table is ticking away, that creates SUSPENSE.

  • One of Hitchcock’s all-time best was Strangers on a Train.   A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.  Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history. The tennis match and carousel finale are unforgettable set pieces.
  • Rope is based on the notorious 1924 Leopold and Loeb thrill kill murder in 1924.   Look for John Dall playing the insufferably smug textbook narcissist while his Nervous Nellie partner (San Jose’s own Farley Granger) is about to snap. Can they outwit Jimmy Stewart?  Hitchcock employed a gimmick to make the entire movie look like it was photographed in one single shot.
ROPE
Farley Granger, James Stewart and John Dall in ROPE

DVD/Stream of the Week: LOCKE – a thriller about responsibility

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lockeThe thriller Locke is about an extremely responsible guy (Tom Hardy) who has made one mistake – and he’s trying to make it right. But trying to do the responsible thing in one part of your life can have uncomfortable consequences in the others. The title character drives all night trying to keep aspects of his life from crashing and burning.

In fact, he never leaves the car and, for the entire duration of the movie, we only see his upper body, his eyes in the rearview mirror, the dashboard and the roadway lit by his headlights. All the other characters are voiced – he talks to them on the Bluetooth device in his BMW. Sure, that’s a gimmick – but it works because it complements the core story about the consequences of responsibility.

Locke is written and directed by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises). The story is actually a domestic drama – there are no explosions to dodge, no one in peril to rescue and no bad guys to dispatch. But it’s definitely a thriller because we care about whether Locke meets the two deadlines he will face early the next morning.

It’s a masterful job of film editing by Justine Wright (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland). After all, her cuts help keep us on the edge of our seats, despite her working with a very finite variety of shots (Locke’s eyes, the dashboard, etc.).

Hardy, who’s known as an action star, is excellent at portraying this guy who must try to keep his family, biggest career project and self-respect from unraveling at the same time, only armed with his ability to persuade others. It’s a fine film. Locke is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube abd Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

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THE BIG SICK
THE BIG SICK

After a long and boring drought, there is finally an appealing menu of movie choices in theaters:

  • Baby Driver is just an action movie, but the walking, running and driving are brilliantly time to the beat of music.
  • The Journey is a fictional imagining of a real historical event and is an acting showcase for Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall as the two longtime blood enemies who collaborated to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The delightfully smart and character-driven Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony with a community of traditional women in revolt. The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the darkly realistic Western Dead Man’s Burden.   Dead Man’s Burden is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.

Tonight on TV, Turner Classic Movies presents Raw Deal (1948), with some of the best dialogue in all of film noir, a love triangle and the superb cinematography of John Alton.

Later this week on July 11, TCM offers the very best Orson Welles Shakespeare movie, Chimes at Midnight.

And on July 12, TCM airs Days of Wine and Roses, Blake Edwards’ unflinching exploration of alcoholism, featuring great performances by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick (both nominated for Oscars) and Charles Bickford.

Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES

DVD/Stream of the Week: DEAD MAN’S BURDEN – times are hard and the women are harder

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DEAD MAN’S BURDEN

I always welcome a new Western, and writer-director Jared Moshe’s impressive debut Dead Man’s Burden takes us to a darkly realistic Old West. The dry New Mexico landscape is beautiful but unforgiving, and the law is three days ride away. The times are hard and the women are harder. The Civil War ended five years before, but families are still reeling from losing a generation of young men.

As the film opens, a man rides away on horseback. A petite woman, young but worn, hoists an 1853 Enfield rifle to her shoulder, takes aim and fires. We later learn the identity of the man, his relationship to the woman and her reason for firing. It’s not what you might guess. And the villain is not who you expect it to be.

Moshe’s story reveals some characters to be bound by duty and others to be opportunistic. They are caught in the same web of circumstance, which funnels inevitably them to conflict. The movie’s final two shots echo an earlier moment, and neatly (if grimly) wrap up the tale.

The cast – Barlow Jacobs, Clare Bowen (Scarlet in ABC’s Nashville), David Call and veteran Richard Riehle – is uniformly good. Jacobs (Kid in Shotgun Stories) is especially well suited for a Western hero, with expressive eyes that narrow like Eastwood’s or Van Cleef’s.

There’s a gunfight that is more historically typical than the usual cinematic facedown in the street. These men, hunters and former soldiers, chase each other through the brush, firing from cover. It ain’t heroic. And Dead Man’s Burden is remarkably unsentimental.

DEAD MAN’S BURDEN

Dead Man’s Burden was shot on 35mm by Robert Hauer, and the look of the film brings out the isolating vastness of the land. Sadly, the sound is substandard, and I had difficulty comprehending some of the dialogue.

Dead Man’s Burden is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

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OKJA
OKJA

Current movie recommendations (Okja and Moka are both good – don’t get them mixed up):

  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The delightfully smart and character-driven Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony with a community of traditional women in revolt. The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
  • The David and Goliath documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the riveting story of an American family business bullied into a nightmarish fight for survival.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the geezer roadtrip comedy Land Ho!, available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, and Google Play.

This week Turner Classic Movies brings us three classics of film noir:

  • While the City Sleeps is a tale of boardroom backstabbing from the cinema great Fritz Lang. The killer cast is so deep (Dana Andrews, Ida Lupino, Vincent Price, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Rhonda Fleming), that noir leading man Howard Duff is stuck playing the cop. July 5 on TCM.
  • Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is another film noir from the great Fritz Lang.  Seeking to discredit capital punishment, a reporter (Dana Andrews) gets himself charged with and CONVICTED of a murder – but then the evidence of his innocence suddenly disappears! Crackerjack (and deeply noir) surprise ending. July 5 on TCM.
  • Raw Deal features some of the best film noir dialogue, a love triangle and the superb cinematography of John Alton. July 7 on TCM.

Also on July 5, TCM presents Sam Peckinpah’s very underrated neo-noir crime drama The Getaway (1972) starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. McQueen and MacGraw are delightful to watch as they move between violent clashes and double- and triple-crosses. There’s a still-shocking but funny plot thread involving a sadistic villain (Al Lettieri – Sollozzo the Turk in The Godfather), a trashy bimbo (Sally Struthers) and her poor hubbie (Jack Dodson – Howard Sprague in The Andy Griffith Show). The wonderful cast is rounded out with Peckinpah regulars: Slim Pickens, Ben Johnson, Dub Taylor, Richard Bright and Bo Hopkins.

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw in THE GETAWAY
Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw in THE GETAWAY

DVD/Stream of the Week: LAND HO! – rowdy geezer roadtrip to Iceland

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Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson in LAND HO!
Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson in LAND HO!

Here’s a really fun movie. Land Ho! features a vibrant and irascible geezer who conscripts an old friend into a rowdy road trip to – of all random places – Iceland. It’s a showcase for Earl Lynn Nelson, who essentially plays himself in the movie. Nelson is a 72-year-old Kentucky doctor who is a force of nature and has possibly an even dirtier mind than The Movie Gourmet’s. He is a friend of the 29-year-old writer director Martha Stephens who was INSPIRED to see the possibilities in sending him off on an adventure and filming the results. His friend (and ex-brother-in-law) is played by an actor, Paul Eenhoorn.

It all works. Nelson – an unapologetic hedonist – is funnier than hell, and Eenhoorn stays right with him as the more reserved and sometimes aggrieved buddy. Land Ho! is a string of LOL moments, whether Nelson is providing politically incorrect fashion advice to young women or unsolicited marital advice to a honeymooning couple or pulling out a joint and proclaiming “It’s time for some doobiefication”.

This is a geezer comedy that doesn’t make the geezers cute. Nelson may be a piece of work, but there’s nothing in Land Ho! that isn’t genuine.

I just have two knocks on the movie. It’s only 95 minutes long, but it would be crisper at about 87. And, as The Wife pointed out, there’s really no need for the huge jarring subtitles to let us know precisely where these guys are in Iceland.

Nevertheless, it’s worth a watch. The audience at Sundance loved this movie, and I think Land Ho! is a hoot-and-a-half. Land Ho! is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, and Google Play.

{Note: I got the meet and spend some time with Paul Eenhorn at Cinequest 2015, when he was premiering his film In the Company of Women. Great guy.]

Movies to See Right Now

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THE WOMEN'S BALCONY
THE WOMEN’S BALCONY

In theaters this week:

  • The delightfully smart and character-driven Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony with a community of traditional women in revolt. The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony.
  • The David and Goliath documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the riveting story of an American family business bullied into a nightmarish fight for survival.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

Here’s my contribution to the argument about the Best 25 Movies of the 21st Century.

My Stream of the Week won the Oscar for Best Documentary feature.  Searching for Sugar Man is the story of a Detroit construction laborer who didn’t know that he was a rock star. You can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

On June 27, Turner Classic Movies presents the iconic 1946 film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice.  An essential element in film noir is a guy’s lust for a Bad Girl driving him to a Bad Decision, and when John Garfield first sees Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, you can tell that he’s hooked.  She’s a Bad Girl, and a Bad Decision is on its way.

John Garfield's first look at Lana Turner in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
John Garfield’s first look at Lana Turner in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE